BareBones Barbell Club of Tucson
Contact Us For: strength training, power lifting, Olympic Lifting, private coaching
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Before we resume our discussion of the effect of your mood on lifting, I want to say Good Luck to our Team this weekend. Our Regional Team will throw down for their Mock Regional beginning tomorrow. After that begins their tapering until we leave for Salt Lake City!!
 A few of the ladies of the 9am on Taylor’s last day. They’ve been staying after class and working on their relationship with the barbell too!!
Also, we wish Taylar Stallings to CRUSH IT at the South Central CrossFit Games Regional this weekend!! Chris is with her now. Check our facebook for updates.
Last week we talked about the physiologic gender differences that occur in response to anger and stress and how those play out in a weight lifting environment. Basically, the conclusion last week was that getting angry creates physiologic responses that potentially benefit men in the weight room and are not so effective for women. Today I want to talk about when it is time to call on that anger, when it might be detrimental and what it means for women.
What I have observed in many novice male lifters is that too much emotion is actually a problem. When you have not built a mind body connection that is so powerful that each and every time you walk up to the bar for a deadlift, your body knows exactly how to perform the movement correctly, then you need to keep your intellect engaged. Until you have performed thousands of reps, you need to focus on technique. In novice lifters there is a back and forth, give and take, between your pure strength and your technique. For a period of time, brute strength will set new PRs for you. Then you fix technique, then you get a little stronger and so on and so forth. At any moment in that cycle, if your technique is terrible, it will be an insurmountable stumbling block. Getting all hyped up to clean, and then, doing it like an 8th grade football player is not a winning combination. You would be much better served to set emotion aside and keep your brain turned on and listen to your coach. The older, more experienced lifters know that if they get intense too soon, they dump a huge amount of energy and hormones and then when it is time to lift they are drained. I love going to meets and observing the difference between young lifters and the older, more accomplished lifters. The more experienced lifters know when to time that intensity. They don’t waste it and more importantly, it comes second or third to their technique and their long years of getting stronger. Yes, getting angry or intense helps them with the lift, but it is the icing on the cake baked of technique and slog in the weight room.
For you younger, less experienced lifters, especially those of you who are gaining exposure to these movements via CrossFit, your technique is going to be your stairway to PRs, not your emotion.
For women, we have to look at this in a slightly different light. Rather than combating our inherent instinct to get wound up and mad at the barbell, we have to figure out how to feel dominant. For the most part, novice female lifters are quite technique-focused, a bit more nervous about getting injured and less aggressive and confident with the barbell. These are all amazingly beneficial qualities early on in your lifting career, but the fact is, a relationship with a barbell is not really built of communication and cooperation. That thing is cold, hard iron. It doesn’t care or know how you are feeling. You’ve got to take control and dominate it or it will dominate you. It won’t help to talk to it or about it. Don’t give it any power. Give it respect, but make it yours. As women, I don’t think getting angry at the barbell is quite the answer. The answer is for us to cultivate whatever makes us feel most powerful. Anger for women, often makes us feel powerless and at the mercy of something bad happening. Instead, think about what makes you feel powerful? What makes you feel like you are in charge of your destiny? That is how you want to step up to your barbell. No fear, no stress, no concern, no anxiety. Ultimate confidence, even if you are faking it, is how you want to step up to the barbell.
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Part II of Barbells and Anger, coming next!
 Sending them off in style…
Part of the reality of being a CrossFit facility in a University town with plenty of young amazing athletes is that we lose them when they move on from this University. It is our luck to have you during this brief time you spend in Tucson. We have so many of you moving on to your first jobs, marriages in new cities and grad school!! Luckily for us some of you who are also graduating this week are staying put for a bit, but for those of you leaving our desert paradise, from the CrossFit Works Team, WE WISH YOU ALL THE BEST IN YOUR NEW ADVENTURES!!
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Merry Monday everyone! A couple reminders: this is the final week to sign up for our lean mass gain program “Size Matters”. You begin May 13. Also May 13 begins our summer Morning Blend class at 5:45am M W F.
This will be a 2-part post:
Our coaching staff had a little talk about the role of emotion in training last week. Variations on this topic are a common theme in a gym where performance athletes hone their skills and where people come every day to have their personal limits tested. Today, I want to talk about a specific type of emotion that people often think is beneficial to their performance especially in weight lifting. I think we can all agree that there are emotions that can be our enemy for performance especially fear. There is a sense though, usually among men, that weight lifting is best done with a high degree of emotion, especially anger. If I had a dollar for every man in the weight room who has told me to “get mad” I’d be rich. The origins of this “getting mad at the barbell will get the weight up” theory are legitimate. It is generally understood that people have a fight-or-flight response as part of our survival mechanism. Adrenaline is one of the stress hormones that triggers us to stay and fight or turn and flee…oorrrrr, if you are a woman it triggers you to “tend and befriend”. Whaaat?? Am I really saying that women don’t have a “fight or flight” reaction? Kind of.
Some of the early research initiated partly by the work and theories of physiologist Walter Cannon in the 1930s on the release of catecholamines (stress hormones) indicated that all humans and animals had a similar physiologic response to stress: increased heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure. Alas, as in many areas of research, men were the primary subjects of study. New research conducted since 2000 is suggesting that physiologic responses to stress are actually gender-determined. In fact, a recent Australian study identified the SRY gene (the gene formerly known only for it’s role in developing male genitalia in-utero) as a gene responsible for the release of the catecholamine hormones that turn on the increased heart rate and blood pressure in men as a stress response. Women obviously do not possess this SRY gene and as a result, we respond to stress differently. Most of the primate and human studies on the female stress response have clearly described that in response to stress females excrete endorphins and oxytocin-the hormones that cause kind and loving social responses to children and the other members of our social realm. In other words, the female stress hormones trigger “tend and befriend”. Two male rhesus monkeys under stress will fight each other to the death, two females under stress will groom each other. Now, physiology is never simple-females also have those same sympathetic nervous system responses to stress that men have like increased heart rate, but at differing levels and moderated by the release of “feel good” endorphins.
OK-so basically, in response to a strong emotion like anger, men release that flood of hormones, including testosterone that basically power them up. For women it is not such a powerful response. If one of you guys gets yourself all riled up by yelling and listening to SlipKnot and having your girlfriend slap you a few times, you will be “stronger”. Ammonia capsules have the same effect without the emotion. If I get ready to lift and someone slaps me, my body releases hormones that trigger me to think about sitting down with you and asking you why you did that. Not so helpful!! What would be helpful for us women, is obviously to experience that increased blood flow and heart rate-to get a burst of strength, but yelling and slapping and getting angry actually may not be the best way for us. Over the last five years I have watched many women in the weight room receive the instruction to “get angry at the bar” – I almost always see the same sort of puzzled look on their faces. Maybe what the Man-With-The-Advice means to say is “release adrenaline, get your heart rate up, spike your blood pressure”. The problem is getting angry may not be the way to make that happen for us. As women we might have to forge our own path on this one. I know that if I listen to music that makes me feel upbeat, if I concentrate hard on seeing myself do the lift, if I take a few short fast breaths and squeeze the barbell as hard as I can, I can make my heart rate go up and I can absolutely feel the adrenaline surge. In contrast, if I am angry my brain is so unfocused that lifting something heavy is the last thing I should attempt. In response to anger I simply don’t want to “fight the barbell”, I just want to not feel angry. In fact, I know if I lift when my mind is clouded by emotion I will screw up and get hurt.
In the second part of this post I will talk about how the reckless application of emotion can also be detrimental to men in their lifting and how the lack of aggression can be detrimental to women in their lifting. We’ll talk ways that men and women can manipulate these gender differences to their best advantage.
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It seriously takes a lot to get me riled up these days. A decade ago pretty much anything could get me fired up about all the outrageous hypocrisy in the world, but I’m a bit more mellow these days (yes, many people are grateful)!! Occasionally, when you all put your empty water bottles in the trash can that says “no water bottles” I do get a bit worked up. But this morning…this morning…I felt that old friend of mine, outrage at injustice and wrongness, lodge itself in my heart. Everyone has their thing that touches them in their soul and inspires them to action-things like animal cruelty, child abuse, chemical weapons, or bad fashion choices (I’m actually pretty serious here, unfortunately). My thing, not surprisingly, has to do with food and the availability of nutritious food to everyone who needs it. This is my work, my passion. It is the reason CrossFit Works exists (sometimes paths are long and winding…).
 Teaching the art and science of lacto-fermentation in 2006 at a local farm in New Hampshire
This morning, at my nearby Whole Foods, I stopped on my way home from the gym to grab a jar of saurkraut to go with my eggs. Saurkraut and eggs are my most common breakfast. It is the only food I push my kids HARD to take a few bites of each day even though they don’t like it. It is the one food I wish all of you ate every day. Saurkraut is athletic performance food par excellence. It keeps your digestive system, beat down by intense training, healthy with the right microorganisms, so you can absorb nutrients. You can read more about why I like saurkraut here: Six Healthiest Foods.
I rotate the brands I purchase (when I haven’t made my own) because I like to try new things and I enjoy the subtle variety of flavors and textures of the various saurkrauts. On the shelf was a large jar of organic saurkraut I had never seen before. I was intrigued until I saw the price: $21.99!!!!! I was speechless. I hope it was a typo but I doubt it.
I consider selling a jar of saurkraut for that much money to be a perpetration of political food injustice. This might surprise you as some of you have been subject to my speeches on why good eggs should cost $6 a dozen or why a gallon of raw milk should cost $15. The cost of food should represent the cost of producing that food in a sustainable manner. Cheap food is not sustainable. It’s a trick. A bad trick. However, the beauty of saurkraut is that it is amazingly nutritious and cheap. It’s like the bones, the feet and the Spam of the animal world. Cheap but powerful. Saurkraut is to organic hot-house tomatoes as liver is to a local grass-fed, organic, aged steak. Liver and saurkraut are more nutritious than fancy tomatoes or steak and a hell of a lot cheaper.
Cabbage is peasant food, cheap food, a gift to those of us who want to nourish our bodies and our families the best we can when we don’t have much money. Cabbage is powerfully nutritious and, cooked properly with dill, sunflower seeds, or browned onions, it tastes good too. Even an organic cabbage is only a few dollars. Saurkraut is chopped cabbage and salt and water. One jar of saurkraut is not even an entire cabbage. How the hell can a jar of saurkraut cost nearly $22?!?!?! Real Saurkraut is ALWAYS gluten-free, ALWAYS raw, ALWAYS a good source of probiotics, and for a dollar or so more, organic. There is nothing that can be done to saurkraut, barring sprinkling it with gold dust, to make it cost $22.
I have been teaching families, athletes and sick people about lacto-fermented foods for many years. I’ve taught people to make their own. I advocate this food as one of the cheapest, most important sources of nutrition. I cannot bear the thought of anyone thinking that a jar of saurkraut is expensive. If you’d like to make your own (pennies a jar full) ask me and I will teach you. If you’d like to purchase a jar that is perfectly lovely, go with the 25oz jar of Bubbies for about $5 or $6. Tell the world, no one should charge $22 for a jar of cabbage. Go get yourself some saurkraut, you’ll be a better athlete, and if you are interested in these sorts of issues read “The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved” by Sandor Katz.
 Gallons of kimchi, a spicy Korean lacto-fermented vegetables, less than a couple dollars a jar: raw, organic, local, hand made
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We hate it when you get stuck in ruts. Change is good. You adapt, you grow, you get better. A few of us got together and designed a new morning class for you called The Morning Blend. The Morning Blend is going to be a “hard work” workout. The influences for The Morning Blend programming were Doug’s military background, Andrew’s fire department training and my desire to see you guys do something new and different. We wanted to see more partner work, more team work, more “figure it out”-type tasks, more real-life movements, more carrying, moving, cooperating. Excellent traditional CrossFit programming like you will find in our Blueprint or Daily CrossFit classes is characterized by being timed and measured. Excellent traditional CrossFit programming improves your efficacy with the common suite of CrossFit movements – you learn to string together knees-to-elbows, to hang power clean, to swing a kettle bell. Sometimes you guys are great with those common CrossFit movements, but when asked to flip a tire or swing a sledge or do a Turkish Get Up with a slam ball, you fall to bits. You will learn to be an efficient “worker” in The Morning Blend, and you will get better at moving your body in relation to all kinds of objects, not just the common CrossFit implements. Sometimes the presence of the clock or the rep scheme subversively influences you guys to rush and short change movements, or choose a scaled version of the movement that is too scaled. Sometimes it should just be something like-”here is the work to be done. Get it done.”
 WORK
Here are the logistic details: The Morning Blend class will replace the 5:30am and 6:00am classes for the Summer Season, through mid-August. Class will now begin Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 5:45am. Class will begin with the Conditioning portion of the workout. The Conditioning portion will be finished by 6:20, so that you can either stretch and head to work or move on to your strength work. The strength work will be the same strength work that the Daily CrossFit class is doing. Performing your strength work after your conditioning work will be a new type of stressor for you all to adapt to since you are accustomed to doing your strength work prior to your conditioning work. Doug will be your fearless leader. Summer is for special fun. This is your Summer Special. Enjoy it!
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 By popular request we are offering a Summer Version of our “Size Matters” mass gain program.
The Size Matters Program is a 12 week mass-gain, hypertrophy program, designed to increase lean muscle mass. It is designed to meet the needs of two different groups: one group will be a typical, mass-gain, hypertrophy group, the other will be a little more focused on the nutrition changes involved in leaning out and getting cut while adding muscle. Regardless of your particular focus, both groups will participate in the final 3 week leaning out phase. Before and after photos are highly encouraged, but not required. This program is not only for guys. I highly highly suggest this 12 week program for all women who would like to increase their upper body strength and develop firm, tight arms, backs, legs, abs and butts. The nutrition portion of the Size Matters program will be absolutely applicable to all women who want to get lean muscles.
Size Matters will run from May 13 to August 3, for a total of 12 weeks.
Meet times will be Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 7:30-9pm. There will also be an additional homework day for everyone on the weekend.
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Weekends are for trail runs with Running Works, squatting heavy and cooking! I’m getting a lot of questions again recently about supplements. My answer is always that you should start with food. I had a special incentive for using real food to recover from Saturday’s marathon of squats, pause squats and a 40rep highbar back squat set at 100lbs. This special incentive was that I am realllly sore and no amount of powders and potions is gonna make it better. What do we need for recovery? We need protein, carbs, minerals and gelatin for cartilage construction, tissue repair building and gut healing. This calls for the good stuff…ok, also I was really getting behind with my magnificent herbs and greens from Urban Desert Garden! So I made a
40rep Squat Soup of Greens
1 liter of chicken stock
2lbs of bulk chicken sausage
10 whole cloves garlic, peeled
3 small organic carrots, scrubbed, in chunks
1 bunch Urban Desert Garden Kale
1 bunch Urban Desert Garden Chard
1 bunch Urban Desert Garden parsely
1 bunch Urban Desert Garden dill, snipped with scissors into bits
2 organic white potatoes, scrubbed and cut into tiny little cubes
2 spoonfuls Dr. Bernard Jensen’s Gelatin
I did a few special things with this soup to maximize it’s ability to help me walk normally tomorrow. First, recall the benefits and drawbacks of cooked vs raw for particular foods. Kale is a member of the cruciferous vegetable family. These nutritional powerhouses have goitrogens (thyroid-inhibitors) which are ameliorated with cooking. Traditional wisdom advises cooking the crucifers because of this issue. Parsley is one of the best sources of Vitamin C hands down. Vitamin C is a heat-sensitive nutrient so cooking parsely is not a good idea. With this soup it is possible to combine cooking and raw veg techniques to make the most of the vegetables. The white potatoes are optional. I cook for two adolescent boys who are growing like crazy, and a member of the Haight-Ashbury generation who forgets to eat enough sometimes, so I often add a little bit more simple carbohydrates to the meals. If you are not desirous of the potatoes you can leave them out, or add a handful of rice if you’d prefer rice to potato. If I had recently roasted a chicken I wouldn’t have used the Jensen’s gelatin I would have used the gelatin out of the roasting pan, but I use more gelatin than I can keep up with from chickens.
Brown the chicken sausage in a heavy bottom skillet. Reserve a few spoonfuls of the fat. In a sturdy soup pot add the spoonfuls of the cooking fat from the chicken sausage. Add 10 whole garlic cloves and the pieces of carrot. Saute until the cloves of garlic begin to brown. Add the bunch of clean kale and the clean chard, leave it dripping from the wash water. I didn’t chop it at all. Cover the pot and let the greens steam for about 7min, stir a few times so they don’t burn. Turn the heat off and pour some cold chicken stock into your blender. I caution you that I use a Vita-Mix which would blend anything, so you might have to do smaller batches if your blender is less powerful. Remember to be careful when blending hot liquids. Put a towel over the blender. Blend 3/4 of the chicken stock with all those cooked vegetables into a perfectly smooth puree. Add the entire bunch of parsely. Puree again until smooth. Set aside.
Pour the rest of your chicken stock into the soup pot and bring to a boil. Add your tiny little potato cubes. Simmer for about 10min until they are soft. Add the chicken sausage and the gelatin. Pour in your green puree carefully. Turn the heat off, cover. This allows the soup to reheat through, but not cooking the parsley. Stir in the snipped dill. You might want some sea salt and pepper. Eat.
Now check this out-I analyzed the nutritional profile of the soup in a nutrition data calculator. Very very impressive.
Nutrient Profile of 40rep Squat Soup of Greens
In a 2c serving (most grown men would eat 3-4 cups, so double the data below):
6g fat
18g carbs
16g protein
200 Calories
600% Vitamin K
176% Vitamin A
98% Vitamin C (same as an orange)
14% Iron (same as 4oz sirloin)
15% Magnesium
27% potassium (more than a banana)
11% Zinc
Vitamin B6 35% (this is one of the primary components of the Sports Supplement ZMA)
Niacin 27%
8% Calcium
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Don’t forget this Saturday, CFFB is meeting at Himmel Park!
We have a guest blog post this morning from Doug, the coach of our 6am class. Doug and I are working on a special summer morning program that will begin in midday May, so stay tuned!
 6am working on snatch progressions
“Why do I love my job? It’s not because I get to see people lose fat and put on muscle, although that’s part of it. It’s not because I get to hang out with awesome people who love to lift, although that’s part of it too. I love my job because I get to watch people face a seemingly impossible task and accomplish it. Sometimes the initial exposure to the task and completion of the task are months apart, but the latter has so far always occurred. I have been coaching now for less than 6 months. When I first came to Crossfit Works I began teaching my morning class how to string together pull-ups. I remember saying jokingly “You guys are doing great! You’re going to do Fran next week at this rate!” We all laughed together because we knew at that point, all the pull-ups and thrusters could not be complete as prescribed. Over the last few months I have seen those same clients labor and toil and scratch and claw to string together pull-ups (as well as become comfortable with many other movements). On Monday, the workout was supposed to be 13.5. Connor had already done it and said he wanted to do Fran (like a boss). I encouraged the two others who had already done 13.5 to give Fran a go with the prescribed weight and pull-ups. They reluctantly acquiesced. Several minutes later some of our athletes completed their very first rx’d Fran. Sure, Graham Holmberg and Rich Froning could have done two or three Frans by the time it was said and done. But it was completed, from beginning to end. What was a joke, and a physical impossibility four months ago has now become nothing more than several very unpleasant minutes.
I hope that all of the Crossfit Works athletes take a little time this week to look back over the last four to six months and look at where they were and where they are now. There is always going to be something that seems impossible. Just remember that impossible doesn’t mean something you can’t do. It means something you can’t do YET.”
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LOCAL MANIFESTATION OF THIS PRACTISE CAN BE FOUND AT JOJOBA BEEF COMPANY. LOOK FOR THEM AT ST PHILIP’S PLAZA FARMER’S MARKET ON SUNDAY MORNINGS-THAT RANCHING FAMILY IS SAVING ARIZONA.
In our day-to-day existence here in Tucson and in the gym, our questions and concerns regarding food and diet tend to revolve around our own body composition, our own health and frankly, how we look and perform. There is nothing wrong with this at all, but I think sometimes it is wise to connect what we do on a personal level with our larger community and the world. Many of you have begun eating Paleo because you want to look better or perform better, it is a self-centered motivation. Once you get out in the world and start talking about why you ordered a steak and skipped the bread you often begin to encounter questions and criticisms that you don’t know the answer to.
Often times people chose to reduce their consumption of animal-based foods because they thought it was the right thing to do for the environment. We spent decades being told that cattle ranches were the reason the earth was a mess. I was a part and parcel of this time. I was a researcher in climate change, specifically studying the processes of desertification both in eastern Colorado and in northern Africa. Those of us who stopped our studying in the 80s and 90s are especially hard to convince that cattle aren’t the source of all evil ecologically. Some of the first Paleo questions you receive will be in reference to the the idea that eating Paleo will mean the destruction of the planet.
Smarter scientists and longer-term research have brought to light some incredible new research regarding the effects of animal grazing on desertification and on animal husbandry as a part of the solution to global desertification. The work of Allan Savory and his Savory Institute is brilliant. Restoring the world’s soils, reversing desertification and feeding people all with sheep, goats and cows. Nothing complicated, expensive or high tech. If you eat Paleo just because you like how you look and feel, that is cool. But if you have an awareness of global food issues and a concern about how your food choices impact the world, please take a look at the work of The Savory Institute. You can see Mr. Savory give a TED lecture here.
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TODAY WE CELEBRATE. TOMORROW WE GET BACK TO WORK.
98% of the time all our coaches and athletes are head down doing work- programming, training, evaluating, correcting and assessing. 2% of the time we are out there competing, testing our methods, our training, our work. Once in awhile we celebrate for a bit before getting back to the 98%. Today is one of those days!!! This weekend was The Test for us:
Olympic Lifters at USA Weightlifting University Nationals in Tennessee
Power Lifters at 100% Raw Arizona State Meet
Final week of the 2013 Reebok CrossFit Games Open Sectionals
All the Olympic Lifters had successful meets and Samantha Silverman qualified for USA Weightlifting Senior Nationals. The Powerlifters took home a boatload of winnings, including Jen Betro’s Best Female Lifter and the 1st Place Open Team Trophy. On the CrossFit Front we were in a much bigger pond: close to 200 teams from the southwest region, over 3,000 individual men and over 2,000 individual women in the southwest region. Chris Gartrell placed 22nd out of those more than 3,000 men earning himself a spot as an individual athlete at the 2013 Reebok CrossFit Games Regional Qualifiers. Leslie Johnson placed 9th out of those more than 2,000 women. 9th. Individual spot earned at the Regional Qualifers. And your team, your gym, with the support and help from all of you, placed 7th in the Team Division. We are the second highest Team in the state of Arizona and the top placing Team in Tucson. Contemplating all these personal and community triumphs is so incredibly humbling. We have accomplished a lot…and we have so much more to do!! Congratulations on your successes, but more importantly, Best Wishes for the work ahead.
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Two of your Blueprint coaches put their heads together on this month’s programming. We were discussing your strengths and weaknesses as athletes as well as your desires that you share with us for your performance. We also talked about how fantastic it was to see so many of you do the 2013 Reebok CrossFit Games Open Sectionals despite your relative lack of exposure to some of the movements.
In general our Blueprint Program was conceived as a way to progress people through the repetoire of CrossFit movements with safety, injury prevention and rapid improvement as the primary goals. When you come in to a program like CrossFit having never done this type of strength and conditioning before your joints, muscles, connective tissues and tendons are not conditioned to do many of the CrossFit movements. It takes time to build a solid, safe foundation to perform the advanced movements in CrossFit like ring dips, snatches, or high repetition box jumps. The Blueprint program is like learning to walk before you run. Many years ago the CrossFit mainsite workouts were vastly less heavy and technical than they are today. The workouts were often primarily bodyweight movements. Five of the CrossFit “Girl” benchmark workouts and several of the first “Hero” workouts were all body weight workouts. Now when people think CrossFit they think of the Olympic Lifting and the heavy technical stuff.
You can think of our program design as following the evolution of CrossFit itself. Walk, run and then run faster. If you can’t do a bunch of solid pullups and pushups and 50 air squats in a row as well as run a decent mile, it is not time to be snatching heavy in the middle of a metabolic conditioning workout!!
This month we are going to visit our old friends, the CrossFit “Girls”. These workouts are primarily composed of bodyweight movements. Conquer these things. Set goals with these foundational movements.
We are also going to begin work on the overhead squat. We will begin to get you familiar with that part of your body called your shoulder girdle. You will find overhead stability with the barbell. We will take it slowly and look for perfection so that when you build on this movement you will do so with safety and ultimately enormous success!!!
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We’ve finally done it. We made an official Running Club!! Recently we had the excellent opportunity to meet Chris Childs, a US Army Special Forces Green Beret for 7 years, marathon runner, strength coach, CrossFit coach and all around nice mellow southern guy. Obviously, Chris Childs is the perfect choice to lead you all in improving your endurance work. The Running Club is set up to be a supportive training environment for a range of runners, including those folks who are not really running yet, but would like to get started and maybe do a local 5k run soon, all the way through more experienced runners who would like to take minutes off their half-marathon.
 The longer weekend runs are open to EVERYONE, not just members of Running Works!!!
The Running Works Club will meet for 2 morning training sessions per week at Reid Park and a longer weekend run at changing locations. Chris Childs will program the training and adjust it if necessary for you depending on your experience. If you are planning to run a half-marathon Chris will give you additional programming as needed.
Training for the Running Works Running Club is going to focus on the Gabe Zimmerman Triple Crown races of 2013. You can read more about those races here. There are three perfect choices: the first of the races is a downtown FunRun on June 1st. The second is either an 8-mile loop or a 5k on Labor Day weekend out at Saguaro National Park East. The culmination is the half-marathon (or 5k option) in October which is run downtown, towards A Mountain and along the Santa Cruz river park. If you have other races in mind, or are not planning on running a race, but simply want to improve your running or find some other folks to run with a few times per week you are welcome to join Running Works as well.
As with all offerings from CrossFit Works, we want to make sure that your running training is complete. As a member of Running Works you will receive sprint training, mobility for runners and injury prevention instruction as well as excellent hydration and nutrition protocols.
Primary communication for Running Works will be at the facebook page. Chris will be on hand at CrossFit Works on Tuesday evening, April 16 at 7pm for a kick-off meeting or to answer any questions you might have about the program. The first workout will take place on Thursday morning April 18.
To register for the Running Works running club go to our registration site by clicking here.
If you have questions about the program please contact us at running@crossfitworks.com. Happy Trails!!
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Many of you had a chance to meet or even train alongside Taylar Stallings last week. She was visiting us from her home in Florida so that she could have a chance to work, in person, rather than on-line, with her Coach, your own, Chris Gartrell. We are pretty excited about Taylar. Watching a young woman with a solid, deep athletic background prepare to become a serious CrossFit competitor is nothing short of Exciting!! Taylar also presents a slightly unusual situation in termsof coaching because she arrived at CrossFit already strong enough. For most coaches involved in preparing women to compete in CrossFit, the first task, which can take years, is to build a woman who is strong enough. Period. Not so with Taylar.
It didn’t take long for CrossFit Media to find Taylar!!! They know someone to keep an eye on when they see it. Read her coverage at The CrossFit Games website this week. YAY TAYLAR AND CHRIS!! Keep an eye on Taylar’s progress by looking for her in the Southeast Region’s Leaderboard.
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Every now and then something comes into my life that makes it so much better. Recently, that thing has been Urban Desert Garden. Tina is one of our athletes (who along with her Blueprint WOD Partner, the amazing photographer Clare Benson, kept me and Cassie on our toes yesterday!!) as well as one of the farmers at Urban Desert Garden. I have spent the last six years of my life in Tucson exploring and working to keep local foods in my pantry. I’ve done the big CSA, checked out all the farmer’s markets, grown some things myself, used the Community Food Co-op, organized group food orders with other like-minded folks, purchased squashes and corn for calabacitas at Food City and pretty much every other option you can think of in this desert town. I’ve done my share of complaining about Tucson’s local food supply (or lack thereof…). One season of the CSA which was weeks of nothing but onions, beets and grapfruits did me in.
 Tina’s Garden = my food
I’ve managed to find the best situation yet…right here in the gym. I leave Tina some money, she leaves me a bag of vegetables. Brilliant. Vegetables I use every day. Greens are the most fragile, and underappreciated category of vegetables. Most of us do not eat them every day, when in fact they are one of the cheapest, most nutrient-dense foods. Minerals, minerals and more minerals as well as the phytonutrients and more fragile heat-sensitive nutrients can be found in greens. Some, like your darker, oxalic-rich greens are best cooked (inlcuding spinach, although I didn’t cook mine this week). Some with the live, heat-fragile nutrients like sprouts and parsley (did you know raw parsley has more Vitamin C than citrus fruit?) are best eaten raw. Urban Desert Garden’s bag of vegtables gave me plenty of opportunity to get my cooked, dark, mineral-rich greens and my live, lively, baby greens.
Last week here is what I had:
Sunflower Sprouts-my favorite raw green for salads or snacks. Whole Foods can keep their wheat grass (although my cats like it). I’m eating Tina’s sunflower sprouts.
Beets and Greens-the beets I boiled ahead of time (if you are still peeling your beets before cooking them, see me!!) so that I can make an orange beet salad. The stems and greens I steamed for breakfast and ate them with a little raw apple cider vinegar. You can read a little more about my opinion on beets right here: Six Healthiest Foods
Lacinto Kale – chopped and added to a sausage soup.
Rainbow Swiss Chard – steamed, topped with gravy and eaten with roast chicken.
Baby Spinach – sprinkled with dark red miso dressing and sliced leftover grilled flank steak.
Baby Lettuces – with everything
Parsley – in the Vitamix high speed blender with lemon zest, olive oil, garlic, raw apple cider vinegar, salt and pepper for a dressing for some spring asparagus.
Blah, blah, blah you might be thinking. You might be thinking, “I hate green vegetables and I come to this gym to train and be a bad ass, not get a cooking lesson”. Check this out-Next time you ask me about post WOD or pre WOD nutrition or what supplements you can take to get stronger, I’m going to give you Tina’s number. She and her garden will do more for you than any jar of pills and powders you can find.
If you would like Tina’s vegetables in your life, see me.
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A few of the ladies of the 9am on Taylor’s last day. They’ve been staying after class and working on their relationship with the barbell too!!
